[sf-perl] what do you do?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi David!

On Wednesday 18 February 2009 03:51:15 David Alban wrote:
> it's been a while since we had...  um...  an email thread.  so let me
> ask you something in which i am genuinely interested.  kind of an
> informal survey.  no purpose other than to satisfy idle curiosity.
>
> two questions about your job:
>

Well, first of all, two warnings:

1. Even though I'm subscribed to SF.pm, I do not live in San-Fransisco, but 
rather in Israel.

2. I'm not employed at the moment, but rather am an unemployed open-source 
developer/advocate/activist/etc. (I'm still looking for a job, if you would be 
interested in hiring me).

> 1,  break down, by percentage of time, what you do.  if you think the
> terminology you use isn't generally understood by this audience,
> elaborate a little bit.

Well, I'll give percentage ranges to make it more accurate:

1. I spend about 20%-30% of my computer time (possibly less) keeping up with 
incoming messages: on Email (mostly mailing lists - both local and 
international), RSS, web-forums or blogs, and lately also Plurk.com (a micro-
blogging service).

I like to keep my inbox in control, so I sometimes take some time to move all 
messages to the appropriate folder. I have a huge "Ham" folder where I keep 
all the messages I received in person, and that don't warranty putting in my 
"saved" hierarchy of folders. I don't want to delete such emails because I may 
need to refer to them later.

2. I spend about 10-20% of my time chatting on IRC and on IM. I'm trying to 
reduce my IRC time to a minimum because it's very addictive and time-
consuming.

3. I spend about 20% of my time working on text: blog entries, technical 
documentation, essays, HTML pages, etc. Some of it involve publicising them on 
various news sites or web-forums.

4. I spend about 10% (possibly less) of my time writing actual code. 

5. I spend about 10% of my time in maintaining my desktop system. I use 
Mandriva Linux Cooker, which is kinda like Mandriva's Debian Testing, except 
without Unstable and Experimental to weed out the most serious bugs.

My system is pretty stable, and usually I can use it with comfort, but 
sometimes there are minor problems, or I need to set up things more to the way 
I like it. That's the point of using Cooker, though.

> 2,  break down, by percentage of code you write, the languages you use
>

* 75% Perl
* 20% Bash.
* 5%  C/C++

With some bits of other language, but usually not for anything too serious.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> i do:
>
> * 50% command line tools development
> * 30% release engineering
> * 20% sysadmin
>
> i use:
>
> * 75% perl
> * 25% bash
>
> david

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82

<mauke>    I'm not interested in what you're doing; what are you trying to 
           achieve?
<PerlJam>  mauke: I'm trying to achieve world peace and this regex is
           the last thing standing in my way! ;)